JOB: Two Postdocs at the MPI for European Legal History/Goethe University Frankfurt, 'Knowledge of the Pragmatici, late 16th, early 18th Century'; DEADLINE 15 MAY 2015

By the third decade of the sixteenth-century, once the first
settlements had been successfully established in the Caribbean as well
as in Central and South America, the Spanish monarchy had to confront
the task of establishing its dominion over huge populations and across
vast distances, albeit with limited human and material resources. In
light of the scarcity and the remoteness, great importance was accorded
to propagating and implementing codes of conduct and modes of
behavioural control – not just among European settlers, but also over
the indigenous populations.
As a part of the Collaborative Research Centre
(‘Sonderforschungsbereich’) 1095, which was approved in November 2014
and is slated to begin at the start of 2015 at Goethe University,
Frankfurt, bearing the title “Discourses of Weakness and Resource
Regimes”, this subproject draws on the broader historical context
described above to ask what norms and mediatic forms had been put to
service by the Spanish sovereign to regulate codes of conduct in the
period spanning between the 16th and mid-17th
century. This study centres predominantly on “normativity”, its
conventional and mediatic sources, not least on “law” and the
functionality of these normative orders. However, the core of this
project draws less on conventional sources of legal history, meaning the
large stacks of textual collections pertaining to the norm setting
practices of higher authorities or other early modern legal sources from
the Castilian tradition and ius commune. Instead, special
attention is being paid to modalities of normativity and their special
mediatic forms primarily established to reach out to “practitioners” –
and, in particular, sources from the fields of moral theology, pastoral
or catechetic literature. Research on private book collections and on
book circulation shows that they predominantly included popular works,
namely small compendia, summaries of greater moral theological works,
and, in part, also juridical theses that were notably used in Hispanic
America.
The project builds on the hypothesis that “pragmatic literature”, in
particular, the strand that powerfully refers back to the tradition of
moral theology, may have gained in significance and functionality in the
remote frontier context of the early modern empire, lacking in
any standard of review: particularly because this body of works did not
represent complex instructions or a sophisticated normative framework,
or even direct command of the authorities. What on the one hand was
regarded as “weakness” could now also be viewed as “strength”: precisely
its succinct and concise quality may have rendered this strand of
pragmatic literature functional; instead of focusing on law and its
enforcement, the works concentrate on the innate force of human
conscience, inculcated by way of rituals and discourses. These texts
were simultaneously “weak” and “strong”, not only because it was
possible to tie them in with Christian traditions of a weak discourse.
They were perceived as weak for the lack of theoretical complexity
compared to the challenging scholarly tractates and, importantly, also
because in general they could not be enforced like the rule of law. They
were “strong”, on the other hand, in a pragmatic sense, as their
flexible normative underpinnings enabled them to take up those notions
of legitimacy and basic moral assumptions which became a part of the
moral economy of the colonial society. Not least in the imperial
peripheries, where the American territories were located at the
beginning and where vast swaths of the Americas continued to remain even
after different centres were established in the composite monarchy,
these adaptable and pragmatic texts addressing codes of conduct, such as
confessional writings, catechisms, moral theological instructions,
became particularly important: even in places where the reach of law was
limited or non-existent, the practice of specific regulations and
notions of “proper” behaviour were effectively mediated through
ecclesiastic institutions and players, but also through the omnipresent
religious symbols and their consistent inculcation.
There are some indications that this constellation of resources was
responsible for generating, even minimally, normative conceptions of
social order and thereby also establishing a system of rule: Juridical
normativity and institutions consolidated in a process of
differentiation, essentially resources central to the formation of the
early modern European state, were substituted by religious normativity
and pragmatic literature, which characteristically offered greater scope
for interpretation. As a result, the situation that emerged could be
construed as “weak” when compared to the European context. But set
against the backdrop of the challenge of the colonial project – at the
outset at least – it could be viewed as a functional normative order
built on a distinct configuration of resources.
If these hypotheses were confirmed, the project would also help to
bring to light not just the practical significance and functionality of
this strand of sources, which has received scant attention for a long
time, but perhaps also its intellectual weight. It is possible that the
perceived weaker nature of this literature does not merely suggest – as
often assumed – a form of vulgarization; on the contrary, it may be
possible to see herein a conscious, and considerable work of
abstraction.